Dear Julia,

I have a lot of psychic ability. For example, I often have premonitions that warn me when I'm heading into a dangerous or negative situation. I sometimes have dreams that prove prophetic, and I usually know upon first meeting someone if they are going to become an important person in my life. Some time ago I decided to test and further develop my psychic abilities, and to my surprise, I did terrible on most psychic tests. For example, a friend would draw a certain card from a deck and I'd try to psychically perceive if it was red or black. We would also try to guess things like the numbers and colors the other person was thinking about. I know I've had real psychic experiences, so why do I fail psychic tests?

-Brad

Dear Brad,

It's very common to have lots of psychic experiences and not do well on psychic tests like the ones you describe. Psychic work is an art, not a science. As such, it belongs more to the colorful, enigmatic realm of artists, dancers and poets than the black and white labs of scientists and statisticians. Expecting to be able to replicate psychic experiences in a lab is a bit like expecting to be able to recreate true love with anyone at any time.

This basic truth aside, there are lots of reasons why psychics may fail psychic tests. First, psychics tend to go through key processes in order to prepare for psychic reading work. They may meditate, cleanse their auras, and pray or undertake some other ritual to raise their vibration and alter their state of consciousness. When playing with psychic tests, however, most people just plop down and dive in.

These sorts of tests presume that being able to predict some events means we should be able to predict all sorts of other events, which is a highly questionable assumption. While psychic insights and intuitions can strike out of the blue, this usually happens when something important needs to be conveyed. The more important a future event may be to us or someone we care about, the more likely we are to get clear intuitions about it. This is why many people report experiencing warnings of danger but relatively few are able to determine whether the next card in the deck will be black or red.

These tests also presume that we can turn psychic ability on and off at will, and use it for any purpose. In my experience, this is also not true. Though we may have lots of spontaneous psychic experiences, it takes a great deal of training and development to gain control of our psychic senses. Further, when we trivialize our gifts, they tend to disappear. This is why we may spontaneously receive psychic signs and intuitions about life-changing matters but have a hard time with seemingly minor tasks.

Much of this has to do with the law of attraction: The greater our desire/need for psychic information, the more likely we are to manifest it. When we are basically indifferent to the outcome or when we abuse or trivialize our psychic gifts, they tend to fail.

I've gotten caught by this dynamic a few times myself, once when I was trying to find a friend's lost i-Pod and another time when a friend asked me to predict the gender of her unborn baby. On both occasions, I just quickly looked for an answer in my mind and relayed what I saw. When the information I received proved to be off, my confidence was shaken, but then I had to admit that I had been very lax and casual in my approach. Since these intuitions seemed just like perceptions that proved to be accurate, I learned that it's essential to be in the right mode before I begin.

Emotion is the key to psychic success: whether you benefit directly or the person you are tuning in for benefits, there has to be some emotional payout as a result of your psychic efforts. Of course, what is important to you may be different from what is important to another person.

My aim is to help people feel better and empower them to create what they want in their lives, so if someone asks me something seemingly trivial, I'm going to reach for the bigger issues behind their question. This doesn't mean you always have to have some profound question or issue to work with; the important thing is that it feels important to you.

For example, my son has a lot of natural psychic ability, and money seems to be a great motivator for him. When all five of our kids were living at home, every Christmas we would hang surprise ornaments on the Christmas tree. These were globes that opened so a surprise could be placed inside, and we would place various amounts of money in each one. Usually there were two $5 bills, two $10 bills, and one $20 bill. The kids would circle the tree, trying to sense which ornament held the $20. We did this several times each holiday season, and without fail, Nick would sense which one held the $20. Since $20 wouldn't be a huge motivator for me, I imagine he would do much better on this psychic test than I would.

Another time I told the kids I would give anyone who could guess the color of my underwear $100. Since I was wearing brown and turquoise underwear, I figured my money was safe. Without a moment's hesitation, Nick blurted out brown and green! I never challenged his psychic ability with money again!

Similarly, studies have shown that precognitive ability is a reliable indicator of financial success. In one study, eighty percent of highly successful company presidents scored above chance on computerized precognition tests. Further, these highly successful presidents acknowledged that they used intuition to foresee money-making opportunities.

Scientific research also backs up the idea that psychic tests are far more evocative when they involve emotion. Some of the greatest results have involved tests that randomly show people pictures designed to evoke a strong emotional response. The pictures include peaceful, neutral, erotic and violent images, and the results show participants reacting to the violent and erotic images before seeing those images. This suggests that our psychic senses try to prepare us for emotional shocks. Other tests that have shown positive results involve pleasant sounds versus jarring ones; again, participants showed a response to the jarring sounds before they were heard.

The role of emotion in psychic predictions can be seen in lots of other studies. For example, plants hooked up to EEG machines show reactions when someone thinks about harming them in some way. Other studies have shown a correlation between the number of tickets sold for trains that crashed versus those that didn't, with fewer people buying tickets for trains that ended up crashing. Since this sort of test involves information of an important nature, it's far more likely to produce positive results.

Given all of the above, you would probably do better on your psychic tests if you focused on trying to get information that would prove helpful or valuable to you or others. It would also be wise to prepare yourself by raising your vibration and altering your state of consciousness before engaging in any psychic endeavor.